Following 21 September 2013, news media in the UK offered extensive and elaborate coverage of the Westgate Mall Massacre in Nairobi, Kenya. This act of terrorism, perpetrated by Al-Shabaab, left over 60 people dead. What news media considered particularly captivating was not the devastation of the attack, but the suspected involvement of Samantha Lewthwaite. She remained at the center of news media in Britain for several months after the attack, dubbed the ‘White Widow’. In this article, the authors employ an intersectional approach to explore the ways that race, religion, nationality, age, class, and gender converge in mediated representations of Lewthwaite. They argue that the application of intersectionality results in a more holistic understanding of the content and discursive impact of news narratives about female terrorists and find that news media both vilify and normalize Lewthwaite, representing her participation in terrorism through complex constellations of identity.

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Challenging Liberalism, Feminism as Political Critique, Lisa H. Schwartzman, University Park PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, pp. 210.Lisa Schwartzman's Challenging Liberalism begins with the observation that equality, autonomy and individual rights are the foundation of many feminists' political demands. In this way liberalism has facilitated women's struggle for equality, from the acquisition of the suffrage to abortion rights. At the same time, however, liberal principles are also sometimes used in ways that are troubling to feminists. Freedom of expression, for example, can be understood to protect an individual's right to engage in racist hate speech or produce violent pornography. Schwartzman's goal is to examine why, from a feminist perspective, liberal concepts function in such a contradictory way and to offer a feminist reconsideration of liberalism. She contends that such a reformulation would not only be more consistent with liberalism itself, but also that it would be a more effective way for women, and perhaps all individuals whose political demands group them as a “class of persons,” to address their political demands. Schwartzman's work is engaging, and her discussion of other theorists who have addressed these questions is thoughtful and detailed. The strength of these chapters is such that one wishes she had more fully developed her conclusions.